Well mike6688 and CharleyO,
Good that mike688 started this subject, it opens some interesting points of discussion of what goes on behind the scenes inside the Firefox and Mozilla type browsers, because of their bond with Google.
Google has a finger in many puddings, my dear friends, and also the Firefox and Mozilla type browsers are heavily leaning on the almighty Google technology, it is called prefetching. How to disable this read here:
http://www.tweakguides.com/Firefox_12.html
Google and Firefox Prefetch Search Results
Ah, the things our browsers do that we do not see. Google uses a feature of Firefox and other Mozilla browsers to prefetch the HTML content of the first result of a search when Google believes the user is very likely to click it.
Search for “SitePoint” on Google, then pop open the View Source window for the resulting page. If you search for the string “<link” in the code, you’ll see this tag:
Mozilla browsers see this and download the specified URL immediately, so that is cached in preparation for the user to visit the page. At first glance, this looks like a useful and rather harmless feature, but this can actually produce unwanted side-effects for different parties.
Say you’re a user on a limited bandwidth connection. Do you really want your browser downloading the first result even if you don’t click it? Google’s end-user FAQ explains how such users can disable the feature.
But what if you’re a Web developer trying to keep your visitor statistics straight? Thanks to this feature, your server may be responding to requests where the user never actually visits your site! The easiest way to fix this is documented in Google’s developer FAQ:
Mozilla browser prefetches are sent with a special HTTP request header:
X-moz: prefetch
By trapping such requests and returning a 404 error, you can block prefetch requests. If and when the user does click on the link in the search results, the page will then be requested and loaded normally.
On the other hand the Browster service, doing virtually the same thing (no ad- or spyware), see: http://www.browster.com/ -
and being rather upfront about this, was taken to the scaffold by some , while Google and associates do the same sort of things inside your browser but “under the hood”, there is a lot going on unnoticed, my friends,
polonus